


max mayfield, sitting in a basement with four nerds and a cheerleader

by ayendae



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Fluff, I'm Bad At Tagging, but only because it mentions minecraft, i mean she already was but whatever, max is kind of a badass, nothing but fluff, so much fluff it makes the marshmallow stuff look like rocks, title sucks I'm sorry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-07
Updated: 2019-12-07
Packaged: 2021-02-17 22:09:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21700519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ayendae/pseuds/ayendae
Summary: If you had asked her, this was probably the last place Maxine Mayfield expected to be.On a given Saturday night, Max would rather be smoking a cigarette behind the school, or shoplifting, or beating the shit out of some asshole who’s giving her a hard time. Definitely not sitting in a basement with four nerds and a cheerleader.Or, the story of how Max was placed on the path to Nerdland.
Relationships: Eleven | Jane Hopper/Mike Wheeler (background), Maxine "Max" Mayfield/Lucas Sinclair
Kudos: 55





	max mayfield, sitting in a basement with four nerds and a cheerleader

**Author's Note:**

> don't judge me i was bored  
> also, lumax needed more attention in s3. (DAMN YOU DUFFER BROTHERS)

If you had asked her, this was probably the _last_ place Maxine Mayfield expected to be.

On a given Saturday night, Max would rather be smoking a cigarette behind the school, or shoplifting, or beating the shit out of some asshole who’s giving her a hard time. Definitely not sitting in a basement with four nerds and a cheerleader.

So far, she’d learned how to play Minecraft, which she would have thought was something really dorky if it hadn’t turned out to be…fun. (But don’t tell anyone she thought so).

“Minecraft villages are anarcho-communist micro-societies!” Mike says.

“Says who?”

“Uh, the literal _definition_ of anarchism and communism, Lucas. There’s no central government, they divide up their crops and everything else evenly—”

“Minecraft villagers don’t even eat!”

At first they’d all been playing, but now the controllers sat abandoned after Dustin had thought it would be funny to put them all in Survival and turn the spawn point into a lava pit. Now she was sitting in a circle with the rest of them, listening to them bicker. It was kind of amusing, even if she didn’t understand half of what any of them were talking about.

“—Minecraft has a complete absence of any central government whatsoever, so—”

Lucas rolls his eyes. “Just because we don’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not real, Mike.” Max tries not to stare at him, the way his hands wave around when he gets irritated and the really, really cute scowl he has on his face.

“You get used to it,” a voice says. Max jumps and turns to see El, the cheerleader, sitting next to her and eating a cookie.

“You hang out with these guys a lot?” Max asks her. El nods, brushing crumbs off of her mouth with her perfectly smooth wrist, and gestures towards Mike.

Mike and El had started going out last year, much to the surprise of absolutely everybody in school. The two couldn’t have been more different: Mike went to science fairs and read the Washington Post and drew pictures of molecules, El was top cheerleader and liked the mall and things that Max considered “girly and disgusting.” But the two had a bond, some sort of intensity that Max had never seen with anyone before; certainly not between her own two parents.

Max grimaces, listening as the boys suddenly shift gears and began discussing the various fallacies of Star Wars and its technology. “None of this makes any sense.”

El shrugs, a small smile tugging up her lip. “I don’t get any of it either, but it’s fun to watch. Mike gets really worked up. It’s kind of funny.” Mike, at this moment, was heatedly denouncing the assertion that anyone could survive in space, the Force or not, flapping his arms and flopping his hair everywhere.

“So, how’d you get here?” El asks her, glancing over. Max smirks, looking at Lucas out of the corner of her eye. He was a total dork, true, but he also was also really cute. Not that she’d ever tell him. Lucas had invited her to come hang out with him and his friends by way of stammering and not making eye contact.

“Hey, um, Max?” he had said.

Max had stuffed the last of her books into her locker and said “What’s up?” without looking at him.

“Uh, so…I was wondering if you wanted to, you know—”

_Oh god, is he asking me out?_

“Wanted to what?” she had asked, finally turning to face him.

“Hang out with me and my other friends, tomorrow.”

Max had squinted at him. “Are they all just as geeky as you?”

“Yep.”

“Am I going to have to watch Star Wars?”

“Probably.”

She’d considered him for a second. Unlikely as it was, the two had become friends, bonding over their shared love for old video games, but Lucas hadn’t introduced her to his other nerd friends. She’d seen them around, sitting at their lunch table and arguing loudly about one thing or another, and they were absolutely the sort of people she’d normally find obnoxious.

“I’ll come,” she told him, not sure why she’d agreed. But he grinned at her excitedly and darted away, and she couldn’t help but notice that his smile was really, really cute.

“Lucas,” is all she says to El.

“Are you two like…you know…” El holds up her hand, her middle and pointer finger crossed together.

“What? No, no, it’s not like that. We’re friends, sort of.”

El nods, her eyes glinting. “We kind of thought that you two were a thing by now.” The way she says _we_ strikes Max as strange, how El seamlessly counts herself among an unlikely group of dorks.

Max shakes her head, ignoring the faint pink rising to her face.

“Ow, Dustin!” Will says, falling backwards as the curly-haired boy climbs over him to get to the food.

“Hi,” Lucas says suddenly, sitting down next to her, and offers her a Dorito. She takes it, crunches.

“Sorry about…all of this,” he says. “We’re not always this loud.”

El coughs loudly.

Lucas shoots her a look. “Relatively speaking!” El only grins at him and throws a chocolate chip, which bounces off his forehead. Lucas retaliates by standing up, taking his small bag of Doritos, and pouring out the crumbs over her head. El squawks, batting at him, and whines “Miiiiike, help!” Lucas cackles and picks a large piece of Dorito out of her hair, popping it in his mouth.

Max watches them, jealousy stirring in her stomach. She knows El and Mike were a thing, so it’s stupid to get jealous, but still. They seemed so at ease around each other, in a way she doubts she would ever be around Lucas.

“Hey!” Mike says indignantly from the other side of the room, and a half-chewed pizza crust hits Lucas square in the face. Lucas reaches for a bag of potato chips, but Max beats him to it.

“My aim is better,” she says, and Lucas blinks in surprise before grinning deviously. “Fire away.” Max throws the bag at Mike, only of course she misses, and it hits the wall and explodes. Mike falls backwards, making a crunching sound as he lands and crushes an unlucky potato chip.

“Nice one,” Lucas says sarcastically, but when she turns to him she can tell he’s not being mean. “Really good shot.”

Max flips him off. “Whatever, Stalker.” Lucas laughs.

Someone throws a pillow at them. “Can you not?” Dustin asks. “We already have Mike and El, we don’t need you two making goo-goo eyes at each other all the time.”

“Shut up!” Max and Lucas say in unison, then make a point to avoid each other’s gaze. Max throw a stray potato chip at Dustin, missing horribly and getting it stuck in Will’s hair. Will only sighs and picks it out.

“My mom is gonna kill me,” Mike says, looking around in trepidation at the hurricane disaster zone that once upon a time was a basement.

Dustin shrugs, picking up a potato chip, brushing it off, and popping it in his mouth. “I dunno, dude,” he says. “I don’t think your basement has looked this good in literal years.”

“You all are helping me clean this up. Especially you,” Mike says, pointing at Max. Max scowls.

They’re brushing up the last of it when Will says “Guys, look!”

The group drops what they’re doing (literally—the trash can Dustin was holding goes crashing to the ground, making even more of a mess) and leans over Will. Max squeezes in next to Lucas (totally not on purpose, and totally not so she can feel how warm he is) to see. It looks like colorful pages with bad handwriting, but the boys get very excited over it.

“Wow,” Mike says, leafing through the pages. “I’d forgotten all about this.”

“What is it?” Max asks.

“Our old D&D campaigns,” Mike says, handing her a piece of paper. Max glances at it. The handwriting is awful, a childish scribble, and most of the words don’t even seem to be real words. “And D&D is…”

“Dungeons and Dragons,” Lucas says, and Max notes how close he’s standing. “It’s a tabletop RPG.” She gives him a look, and he clarifies: “Role-playing game.”

“Sounds kinky,” Max tells him, inwardly loving the way he blushes. “Not like that!” he says, his eyes wide. “Like…characters and stuff.”

“Look, here’s my old one,” Will says, holding up a crayon drawing of a wizard in a hat. “Will the Wise.”

“I thought my mother threw these out,” Mike says thoughtfully, reading through the paper. El stands next to him, turning a small figurine over in her hands and admiring it.

“Guys,” Dustin says. “We totally should play.”

Mike frowns. “I don’t know, Dustin…I mean, do you guys even want to?”

Will shrugs, looking at his drawing. “For old time’s sake, sure.”

Will, Dustin, Mike and El sit down on the floor, Mike getting out a battered board and a folder stuffed with papers. Lucas glances at Max. “Sorry if this is really…”

“Dorky?”

“Yeah,” Lucas says. “We don’t have to play, if you don’t want.” Max loves the way he says “we,” and entertains the thought of dragging him off somewhere private, grabbing him by the shirt collar, and—

She shakes the thought from her head. _You will not think about doing it with Lucas Sinclair right now,_ she thinks. _You will not._ Instead she turns and faces the group on the floor, the others already immersed in the game.

“Show me how to play,” she tells Lucas, and even if she doesn’t get something physical out of him tonight, the smile he gives her makes her stomach swoop.

Besides, this could be kind of fun.

(But if you tell anyone she said that, she’ll kill you)

_Maybe hanging out with nerds is something I should invest in._


End file.
